Developing Radical Resiliency

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Sometimes, it is hard to imagine recovering from the loss of a loved one, being deeply betrayed, or being devastated by a natural disaster. It can all feel like just too much to bear. This is especially true if we dare to live with an open heart. At some point in your life, you will come to know a broken heart. Such a shattering can easily make us turn against someone, ourselves, or life itself. Falling into a chasm of cynicism is also an option. How can we once again allow for a life with an open heart?

Brian Mc Laren defines radical resiliency as “the capacity to withstand and recover from hardship or difficulty.” It’s not that there is something strange about collapsing into despair, anguish, and hopelessness. Whatever tempest we face will, to some degree, have its way with us. The key is to be able to find the courage and strength to recover the capacity to dream, open our hearts, and love again. A key may be not to wait until some tragedy is at our doorstep but to create a relationship with life that cultivates radical resiliency.

Withstanding and Recovering

Here are some suggestions for a withstanding and recovering relationship with life.

• Anthropomorphize life. Relate to life as if it’s a person. It’s very similar to what native peoples did with Nature, treating rivers, trees, rocks, and animals as kin. It’s also likely what you currently do with your pets, talking to them as if they are human. Humanizing life makes it less likely that we either get caught trying to conquer life or feel victimized by it. It tends to bring an element of reverence to the relationship. It can help to simply be clear about what you are asking of life and remain curious about what it may be asking of you. There is a greater capacity to recover when we resist defining ourselves as victims of life.
• Forgive life. Life will inevitably shake your world with illness, death, accidents, defeats, natural disasters, and numerous kinds of losses. If you can accept life as mysterious, insecure, and unpredictable like any significant relationship, then it gets easier to forgive life. It may not be easy to assume that life is not the innocent walk in the park promised during childhood. It mostly means that it may be time to be an adult and get honest about life's true nature.
• Life and not your life. We tend to take what life brings to us too personally. Resiliency is nicely augmented when we see our experience as about life and not your personal life. It means you’re willing to live life on life’s terms. Such a willingness has you accepting life as unpredictable and insecure. It also means that most of what occurs in your life will be out of your control. You will withstand and recover with more grace when you see most of your options as how to respond to what life brings, instead of mostly living from what you intend.
• Accept life’s non-permanence. This means that life is about change. Change means one thing ends and another begins. These endings are often about loss. Life issues some wonderful beginnings and some difficult endings. The more we can accept life’s non-permanence, the more we can accept that the journey is much about loss. With such acceptance, there is less shock and less of a feeling of being assaulted by life when loss descends upon us.
• Permission to grieve. Because life is about change and change is about endings, and endings are about loss, it becomes critical to grieve our losses. Emotions have a strong influence over our beliefs and how we act. When we suppress emotional energy in our bodies, the feelings continue to define our ideas about ourselves and others and how we behave. The other side of loss gets compromised, with limited vision about gratitude, creativity, generosity, love, and generativity.
• Don’t walk alone. When suffering besets us, it’s only too easy to become embittered and blind to the light. Being accompanied when our hearts break reminds us that we are loved and cared for. It’s beneficial to be held by someone who offers both empathy and a vision of what may be asked for by life. We can rest in the arms of those who believe in us as waves of grief are released.

Compromised resiliency is mainly due to how we understand life and the relationship with it that ensues. It is common to either idealize the journey or minimize it. The former generates a good deal of disappointment and disgust. The latter can put us in an adversarial relationship with life, where we see our intentions as the crowning influence over what will happen to us. Radical resiliency is not about a response to some event but rather the result of having an authentic relationship with life, being clear about what we’re asking of it, and remaining curious about what is being asked of us.